Category archives: Uncategorized

I have a new theory, and it’s inspired by a book I’ve been reading, The Fault In Our Stars.

Spoilers in this post

In the book, the main charcter is a 16-year-old girl, Hazel, who has cancer. The everpresent barrier in the narrative is that Hazel is running out of time. The author makes it clear that she will not recover — that this will soon come to an end. And because of that, her world feels small. She flies overseas with her oxygen tank and her world feels small. She loses her virginity and her world feels small. As a reader, I couldn’t see past her looming death.

I ran through the halls an undergrad building yesterday. It had been years since I did this — years since my heart palpitated with the fear of walking in late to the disappointed stare of a professor whom I ever-so-desperately wished would approve of me. It reminded me of running through the Silver Center, which is NYU’s main academic building, cursing at the Neoclassic archetecture that split up two adjacent rooms with a 10-story wall. I remember how excited I used to be for class, and not just because I was learning about the dogmatics implications of wormholes for buddhists — but also because my best friend was in that class, and because there was a smarmy super senior who provided live comedy.

It’s 10:22 p.m., and I’m scared I’ll be too tired for work tomorrow. I’m scared that I’ll get there and be unable to perform in a crucial moment, and I’ll be found out as an incompetent fraud. I used to stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, even with work next day, and not feel too uneasy about it. But maybe it’s age or perhaps the lobe that controls responsibility had grown. Either way, I feel scared something might go wrong tomorrow because I didn’t sleep enough.

This is Day 25 of my month-long quest to write a post every day. Of course, it’s not actually Day 25, but rather Day 28 with three missed days.

When I first started this project, I looked forward to every day of writing. Throughout my day, I thought about what I could write about. I thought about turns of phrases, about humorous anecdotes and clarifying metaphors. It’s the kind of thing people do when they really care about something. They think about it throughout the day; they plan; they get excited. But about 20 days in, I stopped looking forward to it.